Defending Hypatia

Why should mathematics, the purest of sciences, have a history? Medieval mathematicians took little
interest in the history of their discipline. Yet in the Renaissance the history of mathematics flourished. This book explores how Renaissance scholars recovered and reconstructed the origins of mathematics by tracing its invention in prehistoric Antiquity, its development by the Greeks, and its transmission to modern Europe via the works of Euclid, Theon and Proclus. The principal architects of this story -- the French philosopher and University of Paris reformer Peter Ramus, and his critic, the young Oxford astronomy lecturer Henry Savile - worked out diametrically opposed models for the development of the mathematical arts, models of historical progress and decline which mirrored each scholar's larger convictions about the nature of mathematical thinking, the purpose of the modern university, and the potential of the human mind. In their hands, the obscure story of mathematical history became a site of contention over some of the most pressing philosophical and pedagogical debates of the sixteenth century.

The only English monograph on Peter Ramus's mathematical works One of the very few English monographs on any aspect of Ramus's intellectual programme The only substantial treatment in any form of the life and work of Henry Savile, one of the pioneers of mathematical teaching at Oxford Explains for the first time the origins of the fictitious biography of Euclid Uncovers a hitherto unknown, but common Renaissance confusion about the history of Platonism Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Lineages of Learning.- Ramus and the History of Mathematics.- From Plato to Pythagoras: The Scholae mathematicae.- To Bring Alexandria to Oxford: Henry Savile's 1570 Lectures on Ptolemy.- The Puzzling Lives of Euclid.- Rending Hypatia: The Body of the Elements.